If you have an old Android phone, millions of websites will stop working in 2021

Bad news for the millions of users, in Spain and other parts of the world, who use a phone with an old version of Android. This is something that has its origin in Let’s Encrypt, one of the world’s best-known secure digital certificate providers, who made a major announcement today that will affect millions of users.

Since as of January 11, 2021, they will stop accepting connections from of devices with Android 7.1 Nougat or earlier versions. This occurs because older versions of the operating system do not have security certificates updated correctly, which will cause incompatibilities.

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Thousands of web pages will not work on old versions of Android

Nowadays, about 33.8% of smartphones They use Android versions equal to or earlier than 7.1 Nougat. Therefore, it means that a huge number of devices are unable to access a huge number of web pages, about 192 million web pages. When these mobiles try to enter these web pages as of January 11, they will receive error messages and will not be able to access it.

What is the origin of this problem? When Let’s Encrypt was founded, it applied that your own ISRG Root X1 certificate It will be installed in all browsers and operating systems. In addition, older devices that do not update these digital certificates automatically have backward compatibility with Identrust’s DTS Root X3. Because of this, the phones were always covered and they had access to the web pages without any problem.

The problem is that the agreement between Let’s Encrypt and IdenTrust will expire dated September 1, 2021. It has been confirmed that said agreement will not be renewed, causing the certificate to no longer work in operating systems that do not update these security components, as is the case of Android 7.1.1 or previous. To make matters worse, it should be mentioned that Let’s Encrypt is used on around 30% of the world’s web pages.

What is the solution

Faced with this problem, there are a couple of solutions. Users with these older Android devices they can install Mozilla Firefox as their browser on the phone. It is the simplest way, in addition to being free, of being able to continue browsing web pages without problems or error messages.

Why does installing Firefox help? For an Android phone’s built-in browser, the list of trusted root certificates comes from the operating system, which is out of date on these older phones. However, Firefox is currently unique among browsers: it ships with its own list of trusted root certificates. Therefore, anyone who installs the latest version of Firefox will benefit from an up-to-date list of trusted certificate authorities, even if their operating system is out of date.

The other option is buy a phone that uses one of the recent versions Android, which are not affected by this problem. Although this is an option that will cost money, so for those who currently cannot afford this, using Firefox on the phone will allow them to navigate without problems.

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